It's Still Life

Those Fictional Greys

Funny thing about long-term memory; it’s like it just happened yesterday. Like when I was remembering my grandmother who departed us nearly 30-years ago. I can see her now. Grandma sitting in a straight-back wooden spindle chair. She sits where the sun breaks through the window but she still feels icy. And it’s just Grandma now; Grandpa’s recently dead. He went out fishing on the 3rd Tuesday of January last year. He threaded a nightcrawler on his hook, dropped the line over the side of the boat, and then had a heart attack. Out there alone on the lake. Floated around for 3-days in grey mist before anyone thought it odd that a rowboat was out there. He froze board-stiff in that rowboat. Someone said he was the oddest shade of grey they’d ever seen. Greyer than winter, some said. Winter’s a widow-maker, Grandma claimed. She looks out the window, sips her Earl Grey tea, and asks for another lap blanket. Her voice is shallow as lapping water. She’s not long for the next world. Asleep or awake, sometimes we can’t tell which when she closes her eyes. Those soft eyelids that disregard the lines between day and night. Sometimes she pretends to be deaf. I suspect that she hears everything that she can’t see. But as I said, it all seems like yesterday. Plus minus those intervening greying years.

like old grey stone,
that blue-eyed cat on her lap.
Alas. Here it ends.

dVerse Haibun Monday “Grey”. Some of this is fiction; some is not.